No Back Pay for ObamaCare Victims

Huzzah! The shutdown is over, the non-essential federal employees are all back at work, they’ll be reimbursed with full back pay, and Harry Reid will allow kids with cancer to get treatment again.

But who’s going to make the tax serfs whole for all the time wasted on ObamaCare? We’re already taking about thousands of man-hours spent trying to log into the bugalicious system. Now people are spending hours on the phone with insurance company representatives, because providers have learned they cannot trust the data coming from Healthcare.gov.

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The paperwork dumped on ObamaCare applicants is confusing and intimidating. I’ve seen what some of it looks like. It asks for sensitive information – both from the individual, and his employer. It takes a lot of work to dig up all the information that is required.

Next will come the mass chaos as people try to use their benefits… and providers, patients, and doctors learn that the system has been pumping out erroneous data. The New York Posthas a story today about doctors grimly preparing themselves for the deluge. Waiting rooms are going to become madhouses. A lot of people are going to learn the time spent in those waiting rooms was wasted, because they can’t use their family doctor any more.

But to this arrogant government, thousands, or even millions, of private-sector hours have almost no value whatsoever. They don’t care about inconveniencing you, because they can use the compulsive force of law to make you deal with them. Think about the most annoying, inefficient business you ever had to deal with… then imagine what they’d be like if they could march you back into their offices at gunpoint, after you threatened to take your business elsewhere.

We already waste a staggering amount of time and money complying with America’s byzantine tax laws. That’s going to get worse because of ObamaCare, and then a new layer of health-care compliance cost will be laid on top of it, and the disruptions caused by the shockingly inept launch of the program will be piled atop that.

We haven’t seen the end of those disruptions, not by a long shot. There has already been one clumsy password dump and reset to fix the system. I’ve seen computer analysts speculating the entire ObamaCare system may have to be dumped in order to relaunch it… which would mean all the hours wasted thus far on creating accounts will have been a complete waste of time. Where do we go to get our stolen time back? When will our ruling class accept that our time is as valuable as theirs?